Wall Street Journal editorial writer Barton Swaim writes that mainstream Democrats have lost their hot and divisive rhetoric to criticize Trump’s firehose of pronouncements and actions since his election. The subtitle is revealing: “Democrats still attack him, but they’ve reverted from catastrophizing to ordinary partisan rhetoric” (“Trump Somehow Lowers the Temperature in Washington,” February 14, 2025). The puzzle needs to be examined.
Let’s recast the issue in terms of “the Left” and “the Right,” as many do, assuming that these two collectives roughly coincide with the Democrat and Republican parties, each of which is not itself unanimous. That the Left has problems in fundamentally criticizing the Right is, in fact, not surprising. Both ideologies rest on an axiomatic primacy of collective choices over individual choices. This is a crucial point. Individual or private choices are choices made independently by individuals or their voluntary organizations. Collective choices are decisions reached by a mechanism of political decision-making—from an ideal continuous referendum to a ruler or group of rulers embodying “the people” or “my people.” Another way to see this is that the Left and the Right are both looking for some “social good” through the tea leaves of collective choices. The Left pursues something like social welfare, the Right something like the national interest. (On individual choices against collective choices, a go-to reference is William Riker’s 1982 book Liberalism Against Populism.)
Mr. Swaim comes close to this analysis when he writes, but too furtively:
[Mr. Trump] has also chosen to begin his second term by addressing a set of topics that don’t lend themselves to easy left-right divides: tariffs and trade, cuts to foreign aid, curtailing of waste. Some of these topics are novel: retaking the Panama Canal, buying Greenland, statehood for Canada, evacuating Gaza. The savvy Democratic response to any one of these issues isn’t obvious.
In reality, most if not all political topics “don’t lend themselves to easy left-right divides” if the criterion lies in the distinction between individual choices and collective choices. Taking over the Panama Canal, occupying Greenland, absorbing Canada, or evacuating Gaza could be proven “good” through the collective choices reached by “the people” of respectively America-cum-Columbia, America-cum-Greenland, America-cum-Canada, America-cum-Gaza. The potentially conquered are only a small minority compared to their conquerors.
One objection is that individual and collective choices are a matter of degrees along a continuum. That is correct. The liberal-individualist principle is that the closer to the individual-choice extreme, the better (at least up to a certain point). This principle may account for some leftist causes being validated by individualist analysis. Robert Nozick justified some compulsory insurance by undue risk individuals may impose on their neighbors; more generally, he justified the minimal state by the risk to individuals of independent enforcement of justice (see his Anarchy, State, and Utopia). James Buchanan justified income insurance and public schools (and perhaps some public health insurance) by plausible unanimous agreements at an abstract constitutional stage (see The Limits of Liberty). More standard classical liberals such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek agreed on some minimum guaranteed income. Anthony de Jasay, the liberal anarchist, viewed spontaneous conventions as nearly as imperious as state laws. On the border of liberalism, John Stuart Mill accepted some intentional redistribution of income.
These ideas, however, carry, at least theoretically, built-in limits in something analogous to individual consent and supporting institutions. In that, the individualist-liberal or libertarian approach radically differs from the collectivist approach of both the Left and the Right. The systemic results of the two approaches for society and human flourishing are vastly different. One crucial difference is that in a state limited by the primacy of individual choices, the character of the ruler and even his level of ignorance do not matter much; under a state representing the primacy of collective choices, the ruler’s features matter critically.
It is true that certain subgroups of the Left (say, “market socialism”) and certain trends in the American Right (say, the Reaganites) were critical of the supremacy of collective choices. The Economist points out a fascinating fact: Bob Dylan’s favorite politician in the early 1960s was Barry Goldwater (“How Bob Dylan Broke Free,” February 13, 2025). But the Left and the Right that we know today are very different from libertarianism.
Logically and normatively, the Left and the Right are both wrong together against libertarianism and classical liberalism. Therein lies the reason why mainstream libertarians have alternatively fought the Left and the Right depending on which represented the most imminent danger, as Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi emphasize in their recent book The Individualists).
To solve the conundrum of the Left falling relatively silent after the virulently criticized Right won an electoral victory with about half the vote (that is, about one-third of the electorate), Mr. Swaim seems to conclude that the losing party realized that the winning party must not be Satan himself. I have suggested that we need to go a bit farther. From the vantage point of the distinction between individual and collective choices, the Left and the Right are, in reality, very similar monsters: they just want to impose different collective choices.
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The Left and the Right
READER COMMENTS
Roger McKinney
Feb 18 2025 at 12:17pm
Good points! The “right” is not the opposite of left, though logically it should be. The right is merely the fascist flavor of socialism vs the Marxist version, as happened in Germany pre-war. Anarcho-capitalism is the logical right.
Hume had the best reason for limited government. We should consider all politicians to be knaves and give them the appropriate power. Though atheist, he held a very orthodox Christian view of human nature.
Pierre Lemieux
Feb 18 2025 at 8:35pm
Roger: John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (1865):
David Hume, indeed, in one of his Essays (1777):
Craig
Feb 18 2025 at 4:05pm
“Democrats still attack him, but they’ve reverted from catastrophizing to ordinary partisan rhetoric”
What they were doing before stopped working, I’d suggest at one point it was effective, therefore they must change what they are doing.
Ahmed Fares
Feb 18 2025 at 4:22pm
Why Weak Men Vote for Communism
Pierre Lemieux
Feb 18 2025 at 11:15pm
Ahmed: This is interesting but I am not sure that the statistics cited by Peter St Onge are reliable. Now, it would be surprising if there were no genetic influences on the preferences of men and women. Evolutionary psychology would suggest that women tend to prefer security to adventure, and men the contrary. (See Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Chapter 9.) This could explain why women tend to be favorable to larger and more caring governments. There is evidence of that: see Lott and Kenny, “Did Women’s Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government,” Journal of Political Economy, Dec. 1999. But the genetic interpretation is not consistent with the hypothesis that single women have different political preferences compared to married women. Moreover, if it is true that there is no fundamental difference between the Left’s and the Right’s tendencies to favor collective choices, we would not expect women to be more on one side than the other. (But we would expect women to be less attracted to libertarianism.) Indeed, doesn’t the feminine vote often switch between the Left and the Right?
Ahmed Fares
Feb 19 2025 at 12:31am
The gender divide between left and right is global in nature and is increasing over time among young people. There’s an interesting chart of some countries in the article.
A new global gender divide is emerging
nobody.really
Feb 27 2025 at 10:47pm
Why would men be more risk-loving than women? Evolutionary psychology has an answer: Throughout history, the odds that a woman would have a living descendant have always outnumbered the odds that a man would.
Why? Various reasons. For example, world-wide, there are 105 males born for every 100 females born; on this basis alone, it seems likely that any given woman would be more likely to find a (male) mate than that any given man was able to find a (female) mate. Also, there are more men who have impregnated multiple women than there are women who have been impregnated by multiple men.
The moral of this insight is that, for any given women, her best strategy to get genes into future generations is to stay alive long enough to reproduce—that is, to avoid risk. For any given man, the most likely scenario is that his genes do NOT end up in future generations—so historically, men who take greater risks have greater opportunities to get their genes into future generations. To be clear, this doesn’t mean that most risk-loving men pass on their genes to the current generation; it means that most people today are the descendants of risk-loving men. If a propensity for pursuing or avoiding risk can be passed down through genes in a sex-specific way, then I would expect men to be more risk-loving than women.
nobody.really
Feb 27 2025 at 11:15pm
In the US, married women–and older married women specifically–tend to vote Republican; single women and women who do not take their husbands’ name tend to vote Democratic.
Ironically, the Republican Congress is promoting the SAVE Act, which would prohibit people from registering to vote unless they 1) registered in person before an appropriate governmental official (e.g., not as part of some groups’ voter registration drive), and 2) presented a narrowly prescribed list of IDs—such as a photo ID and matching birth certificate. Allegedly, these policies are designed to clamp down on voting by noncitizens—a vanishingly rare event. The larger consequence will be to put an impediment in the way of citizens registering to vote. Which citizens? People who have changed their names. And the biggest group of these people are older, married women (80% of whom have adopted their husband’s last name).
It will also pose obstacles to people who live a long way from government offices–say, rural people and people in the military, which are ALSO sources of Republican votes.
Just one more chapter from the Annals of Political Suicide….
Mactoul
Feb 18 2025 at 11:52pm
Are there any irreducible collective choices? This seems to be the crux of the matter. And Jasay appears to believe that there are–when he makes the point that the essence of the liberalism is in preferring the individual choice over the collective choice when it can be done conveniently.
Milton Friedman certainly thought so, indeed the collective choice is implicated in the very definition of private property–he gave the example of property rights in the airspace above a private property. There is no way it can be resolved without collective choice. Same goes for mineral rights below one’s property.
Jose Pablo
Feb 20 2025 at 11:11am
This seems to be the crux of the matter
Why is that?
The question of whether there are a few truly irreducible collective choices—or none at all—is largely irrelevant compared to the fact that modern governments have far more collective choices than just this small set of supposedly irreducible ones (if this set exists at all).
Believing that the mere existence of one irreducible collective choice somehow justifies the organic concept of “the people” and the resulting abuse of collective decision-making is completely illogical. The fact that a slippery slope exists in front of you does not make slipping down it the rational response.
Moreover, there is also the question of how this (very) small set of irreducible collective choices has evolved (and will evolve) over time. If such a set exists at all, it has arguably shrunk since the days when humans roamed the Earth in bands of hunter-gatherers—or when societies engaged in slavery and the widespread subjugation of women. It is difficult to imagine any benefit in perpetuating such irreducible collective behaviors.
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